Teachers vow to ramp up action

Educating the public . . . teachers at Sydney’s Town Hall on Wednesday hold up placards about their strike.
Photo: Dallas Kilponen

by
Michaela Whitbourn

NSW Education Minister
Adrian Piccoli
has accused the state’s teachers union of scare tactics after striking teachers voted to step up their campaign against a push to give principals greater control over budgets and staffing.

About 750,000 students across the state’s 2240 public schools were affected by the 24-hour strike yesterday, which was called in defiance of an order by the NSW Industrial Relations Commission.

The O’Farrell government is rolling out state-wide changes to the way schools are managed to give principals control over more than 70 per cent of school budgets and the recruitment of staff, in line with federal Labor’s $475.5 million Empowering Local Schools policy.

All states except Western Australia have signed up to the national partnership, which does not prescribe how states are to increase local decision-making in schools.

The changes have provoked a backlash in NSW, which has long had the most centralised decision-making processes in the country.

The NSW Teachers Federation says the Coalition’s Local Schools, Local Decisions policy – which will be phased in over the next three to five years – will result in budget cuts and a shifting of the blame for staffing shortfalls from the Department of Education to principals.

“We will keep this campaign alive for as long as it takes," federation president Maurie Mulheron told thousands of striking teachers at Sydney’s Town Hall.

The teachers voted in support of the union’s recommendation to step up its campaign against the policy, including industrial action.

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Mr Piccoli said the union “knows its claims about the government’s reforms are completely untrue but they continue their scare campaign anyway".

“We are not reducing school budgets," he said.

The government will ask the Industrial Relations Commission to fine the union for pushing ahead with an illegal strike. It has introduced a bill to increase the maximum penalty for unions which ignore orders not to strike from $10,000 to $110,000.

On Tuesday, NSW Premier
Barry O’Farrell
raised the ire of Industrial Relations Commission president Justice
Roger Boland
by saying it was “about time . . . [it] frankly pulled the finger out" and fined the union.

He has previously called Justice Boland, who was an employer advocate at the Australian Industry Group for almost two decades, an “activist judge".

Justice Boland said Mr O’Farrell’s statements were “unfortunate" and would not influence the court. The Education Department had not asked for its application for penalties to be dealt with urgently, he said.

Canberra is providing one-off grants to 229 NSW public schools to help them implement the Empowering Local Schools initiative as it has been applied in the state. All of the state’s public schools will implement at least some of the reforms.

A spokeswoman for federal Minister for School Education
Peter Garrett
said “industrial matters and school budget allocations remain the responsibility of the NSW government".

But the spokeswoman said Empowering Local Schools was “not about cutting school budgets or undermining existing staffing arrangements" but putting more power in the hands of people who were in the best position to make decisions for students.